XI. Hierarchy
The same conception of a universal order is also of fundamental importance in the religious development of India and Persia. It appears in the Rigveda . . . under the name of Rta or Rita. It is usually translated as Order or Right, but it is difficult to find any equivalent for it in modern English since it is at once cosmic, ritual and moral.
CHRISTOPHER DAWSON, Progress and Religion, cap. VI.
Neither can your wonted valour be turned to such a baseness, as in stead of a Prince delivered unto you by so many roiall ancestors, to take the tyrannous yoke of your fellow subject.
Arcadia (1590), II, cap. 28.
Johnson has complained that Milton thought men made only for rebellion and women only for obedience. Others have assumed that since he was a rebel against the monarchy of the Stuarts he must also have been a rebel against the monarchy of God and secretly of the devil’s party. At the very least, there is felt to be a disquieting contrast between republicanism for the earth and royalism for Heaven. In my opinion, all such opinions are false and argue a deep misunderstanding of Milton’s central thought.
This thought is not peculiar to Milton. It belongs to the ancient orthodox tradition of European ethics from Aristotle to Johnson himself, and a failure to understand it entails a false criticism not only of Paradise Lost, but of nearly all literature before the revolutionary period. It may be called the Hierarchical conception. According to this conception degrees of value are objectively present in the universe. Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior. The goodness, happiness, and dignity of every being consists in obeying its natural superior and ruling its natural inferiors. When it fails in either part of this twofold task we have disease or monstrosity in the scheme of things until the peccant being is either destroyed or corrected. One or the other it will certainly be; for by stepping out of its place in the system (whether it step up like a rebellious angel or down like an uxorious husband) it has made the very nature of things its enemy. It cannot succeed.
Aristotle tells us that to rule and to be ruled are things according to Nature. The soul is the natural ruler of the body, the male of the female, reason of passion. Slavery is justified because some men are to other men as souls are to bodies (Polit. I, 5). We must not, however, suppose that the rule of master over slave or soul over body is the only kind of rule: there are as many kinds of rule as there are kinds of superiority or inferiority. Thus a man should rule his slaves despotically, his children monarchically, and his wife politically; soul should be the despot of body, but reason the constitutional king of passion (ibid. I, 5, 12). The justice or injustice of any given instance of rule depends wholly on the nature of the parties, not in the least on any social contract. Where the citizens are really equal then they ought to live in a republic where all rule in turn (ibid. I, 12; II, 2). If they are not really equal then the republican form becomes unjust (ibid. III, 13). The difference between a king and a tyrant does not turn exclusively on the fact that one rules mildly and the other harshly. A king is one who rules over his real, natural inferiors. He who rules permanently, without successor, over his natural equals is a tyrant—even (presumably) if he rules well. He is inordinate (ibid. III, 16, 17; IV, 10). Justice means equality for equals, and inequality for unequals (ibid. III, 9). The sort of questions we now ask—whether democracy or dictatorship is the better constitution—would be senseless to Aristotle. He would ask ‘Democracy for whom?’ ‘Dictatorship for whom?’
Aristotle was thinking mainly of civil society. The applications of the Hierarchical conception to private, or to cosmic, life are to be sought in other writers. When Donne says ‘thy love shall be my love’s sphere’ he has for his background the cosmic hierarchy of the Platonic theologians, specially, I think, that of Abrabanel. Every being is a conductor of superior love or agape to the being below it, and of inferior love or eros to the being above. Such is the loving inequality between the intelligence who guides a sphere and the sphere which is guided. This is not metaphor. For the Renaissance thinker, not less but more than for the schoolman, the universe was packed and tingling with anthropomorphic life; its true picture is to be found in the elaborate title pages of old folios where winds blow at the corners and at the bottom dolphins spout, and the eye passes upward through cities and kings and angels to four Hebrew letters with rays darting from them at the top, which represent the ineffable Name. Hence we are only on the borderline of metaphor when Spenser’s Artegall reproves the levelling giant by telling him that all things were created ‘in goodly measure’ and ‘doe know their certaine bound’, so that hills do not ‘disdaine’ vallies nor vallies ‘envy’ hills; in virtue of the same grand Authority who causes kings to command and subjects to obey. This is for Spenser more than a fanciful analogy. The social hierarchy has the same source as the cosmic, is indeed the impression of the same seal made upon a different kind of wax.
The greatest statement of the Hierarchical conception in its double reference to civil and cosmic life is, perhaps, the speech of Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus. Its special importance lies in its clear statement of the alternative to Hierarchy. If you take ‘Degree’ away ‘each thing meets in mere oppugnancy’, ‘strength’ will be lord, everything will ‘include itself in power’. In other words, the modern idea that we can choose between Hierarchy and equality is, for Shakespeare’s Ulysses, mere moonshine. The real alternative is tyranny; if you will not have authority you will find yourself obeying brute force.
Hierarchy is a favourite theme with Shakespeare. A failure to accept his notion of natural authority makes nonsense, for example, of The Taming of the Shrew. It drives the Poet Laureate into describing Katharina’s speech of submission as ‘melancholy clap-trap’. It drives modern producers into making Katharina give the audience to understand that her submission is tactical or ironical. There is not a hint of this in the lines Shakespeare has given her. If we ask what Katharina’s submission forebodes, I think Shakespeare has given us his answer through the lips of Petruchio: ‘Marry, peace it bodes, and love and quiet life, An awful rule and right supremacy, And, to be short, what not, that’s sweet and happy?’ The words, thus taken at their face value, are very startling to a modern audience; but those who cannot face such startling should not read old books. If the poet had not meant us to rejoice in the correction of Katharina he would have made her a more amiable character. He certainly would not have gone out of his way to show us, beneath the mask of her pretended hatred of men, her jealous bullying of her sister. Nor is evidence lacking from other plays to prove that Shakespeare accepted the doctrine of ‘right supremacy’ in its full extent. ‘Headstrong liberty’ (of women from men) ‘is lashed with woe,’ as we learn in the Comedy of Errors. A child is to its parent ‘but as a form in wax’, says Theseus. A child attempting to argue with a father—and that father, the sage Prospero—receives for sole answer, ‘What? I say, my foot my tutor?’ Even Lear is seen in a wrong light if we do not make more than modern concessions about parental and royal authority. Even Macbeth becomes more intelligible if we realize that the wife’s domination over the husband is a ‘monstrous regiment’. It seems to me beyond doubt that Shakespeare agreed with Montaigne that ‘to obey is the proper office of a rational soul’.
Now if once the conception of Hierarchy is fully grasped, we see that order can be destroyed in two ways: (1) By ruling or obeying natural equals, that is by Tyranny or Servility. (2) By failing to obey a natural superior or to rule a natural inferior—that is, by Rebellion or Remissness. And these, whether they are monstrosities of equal guilt or no, are equally monstrosities. The idea, therefore, that there is any logical inconsistency, or even any emotional disharmony, in asserting the monarchy of God and rejecting the monarchy of Charles II is a confusion. We must first inquire whether Charles II is, or is not, our natural superior. For if he is not, rebellion against him would be no departure from the hierarchical principle, but an assertion of it; we should obey God and disobey Charles for one and the same reason—just as even a modern man might obey the law and refuse to obey a gangster for one and the same reason. And lest even so very obvious a truth as this should escape his readers, Milton has made it explicit in two contrasted passages.
The first of these is the debate between Satan and Abdiel in Book V. Both parties are sound Aristotelians, but the point is that Satan is wrong about matter of fact. Satan’s argument is hampered by the fact that he particularly wants to avoid equality among his own faction and therefore has to turn aside for a moment to explain (789 et seq.) that ‘Orders and Degrees Jarr not with liberty.’ He is not very explicit on the subject, et pour cause. The passage is one of those where (rightly and indeed inevitably) an element of grim comedy is permitted. But Satan’s main contention is clear. He is maintaining that the vice-regency of the Son is a tyranny in the Aristotelian sense. It is unreasonable to assume monarchy ‘over such as live by right His equals’ (792). Abdiel’s reply is double. In the first place he denies Satan’s right to criticize God’s actions at all, because God is his creator. As creator He has a super-parental right of doing what He will without question—‘my foot my tutor?’ In the second place, granting Satan’s definition of tyranny, he denies Satan’s facts; the Son is not of the same nature as the angels and was indeed the instrument by whom they were made. Of course, if He is not their natural equal, ‘unsucceeded power’ (818) on His part (the word unsucceeded links the passage with Aristotle) would not be tyranny, but just rule. And this is so obvious that Satan, in attempting to reply, is reduced to the ridiculous and incoherent theory that the angels were ‘self-begot’ with the kindly assistance of a chimaera called ‘fatal course’ (858).
The other passage comes at the beginning of Book XII. We are there told how human monarchy arose. One of ‘ambitious heart’—that is, one sinning Satan’s own sin—became discontent with the fraternal equality which ought to prevail among natural equals. In rejecting this he was rebelling against the ‘law of nature’. His ‘Empire’ was therefore ‘tyrannous’, and his pretence to divine Right (‘As from Heav’n claiming second sovrantie’) was spurious. For, as Adam points out, ‘fatherly displeased’, and by that fatherly displeasure asserting the true hierarchical principle at the very moment of condemning a tyrannous breach of it, ‘Dominion absolute’ was given to Man in general over Beast in general, not to one man over other men (XII, 24–70).
The rebellion of Satan and the tyranny of a Nimrod or a Charles are wrong for the same reason. Tyranny, the rule over equals as if they were inferiors, is rebellion. And equally, as Shakespeare’s Ulysses saw, rebellion is tyranny. All Milton’s hatred of tyranny is expressed in the poem: but the tyrant held up to our execrations is not God. It is Satan. He is the Sultan—a name hateful in Milton’s day to all Europeans both as freemen and as Christians. He is the chief, the general, the great Commander. He is the Machiavellian prince who excuses his ‘political realism’ by ‘necessity, the tyrant’s plea’. His rebellion begins with talk about liberty, but very soon proceeds to ‘what we more affect, Honour, Dominion, glorie, and renoune’ (VI, 421). The same process is at work in Eve. Hardly has she swallowed the fruit before she wants to be ‘more equal’ to Adam; and hardly has she said the word ‘equal’ before she emends it to ‘superior’ (IX, 824).
Some may say that though Milton’s assertion of Divine monarchy is thus logically compatible with his republicanism, yet logic is not enough. They detect an emotional disharmony in the poem: whatever the poet may say, he does not in their opinion, feel the claims of authority as he feels those of freedom. Our actual experience in reading the poem is what counts—not logical constructions which we can make about it. But then our actual experience depends not only on the poem but on the preconceptions we bring to it. It would not be surprising if we, who were mostly brought up on egalitarian or even antinomian ideas, should come to the poem with minds prepossessed in favour of Satan against God and of Eve against Adam, and then read into the poet a sympathy with those prepossessions which is not really there.
I believe this has happened, but there is a distinction to be made. It is one thing to say that Milton failed to apply the hierarchical idea to himself, and quite another to say that his belief in it was superficial. We are not ‘so grossly ignorant of human nature as not to know that precept may be very sincere where practice is very imperfect’. I am willing to admit that Milton himself probably failed in the virtues of obedience and humility: and if all you mean by a disharmony in the poem is merely that the poet thought better than he lived and loved higher virtues than he had attained, then the poem is divided. But if you mean that he paid only lip service to the principle of subordination, that the dictates of his superficial and conventional conscience were, in this matter, opposed to the deepest impulses of his heart then I disagree. The Hierarchical idea is not merely stuck on to his poem at points where doctrine demands it: it is the indwelling life of the whole work, it foams or burgeons out of it at every moment.
He pictures the life of beatitude as one of order—an intricate dance, so intricate that it seems irregular precisely when its regularity is most elaborate (V, 620). He pictures his whole universe as a universe of degrees, from root to stalk, from stalk to flower, from flower to breath, from fruit to human reason (V, 480). He delights in the ceremonious interchange of unequal courtesies, with condescension (a beautiful word which we have spoiled) on the one side and reverence on the other. He shows us the Father ‘with rayes direct’ shining full on the Son, and the Son ‘o’er his scepter bowing’ as He rose (VI, 719, 746); or Adam ‘not aw’d’ but ‘bowing low’ to the ‘superior Nature’ when he goes out to meet the archangel, and the angel, unbow’d but gracious, delivering his speeches of salutation to the human pair (V, 359–90); or the courtesies of lower to higher angels as ‘is wont in Heav’n Where honour due and reverence none neglects’ (III, 737); or Adam smiling with ‘superior love’ on Eve’s ‘submissive charms’ like the great Sky-Father smiling on the Earth-Mother (IV, 498); or the beasts, duteous at the call of Eve as at Circe’s (IX, 521).
The significance of all this seems to me very plain. This is not the writing of a man who embraces the Hierarchical principle with reluctance, but rather of a man enchanted by it. Nor is this at all surprising. Almost everything one knows about Milton prepares us for such an enchanting and makes it certain that Hierarchy will appeal to his imagination as well as to his conscience, will perhaps reach his conscience chiefly through his imagination. He is a neat, dainty man, ‘the lady of Christ’s’; a fastidious man, pacing in trim gardens. He is a grammarian, a swordsman, a musician with a predilection for the fugue. Everything that he greatly cares about demands order, proportion, measure, and control. In poetry he considers decorum the grand masterpiece. In politics he is that which of all things least resembles a democrat—an aristocratic republican who thinks ‘nothing more agreeable to the order of nature or more for the interest of mankind, than that the less should yield to the greater, not in numbers, but in wisdom and in virtue’ (Defensio Secunda. Trans. Bohn. Prose Wks., Vol. I, p. 256). And soaring far beyond the region of politics he writes, ‘And certainly Discipline is not only the removal of disorder; but if any visible shape can be given to divine things, the very visible shape and image of virtue, whereby she is not only seen in the regular gestures and motions of her heavenly paces as she walks, but also makes the harmony of her voice audible to mortal ears. Yea, the angels themselves, in whom no disorder is feared, as the apostle that saw them in his rapture describes, are distinguished and quaternioned into their celestial princedoms and satrapies, according as God himself has writ his imperial decrees through the great provinces of heaven. The state also of the blessed in paradise, though never so perfect, is not therefore left without discipline, whose golden surveying reed marks out and measures every quarter and circuit of New Jerusalem.’ Mark well the reason. Not because even saved souls will still be finite; not because the withdrawing of discipline is some privilege too high for creatures. No; there will be discipline in Heaven ‘that our happiness may orb itself into a thousand vagancies of glory and delight, and with a kind of eccentrical equation be, as it were, an invariable planet of joy and felicity’ (Reason of Church Government, 1, cap. I. Prose Wks. Bohn, Vol. II, p. 442). In other words, that we may be ‘regular when most irregular we seem’. Those to whom this conception is meaningless should not waste their time trying to enjoy Milton. For this is perhaps the central paradox of his vision. Discipline, while the world is yet unfallen, exists for the sake of what seems its very opposite—for freedom, almost for extravagance. The pattern deep hidden in the dance, hidden so deep that shallow spectators cannot see it, alone gives beauty to the wild, free gestures that fill it, just as the decasyllabic norm gives beauty to all the licenses and variations of the poet’s verse. The happy soul is, like a planet, a wandering star; yet in that very wandering (as astronomy teaches) invariable; she is eccentric beyond all predicting, yet equable in her eccentricity. The heavenly frolic arises from an orchestra which is in tune; the rules of courtesy make perfect ease and freedom possible between those who obey them. Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules. And as this passage should settle once and for all the question whether Milton loved from his heart the principle of obedience, so they should also set at rest that imaginary quarrel between the ethical and the poetic which moderns often unhappily read into the great poets. There is no distinction here. The whole man is kindled by his vision of the ‘shape of virtue’. Unless we bear this in mind we shall not understand either Comus or Paradise Lost, either the Faerie Queene or the Arcadia, or the Divine Comedy itself. We shall be in constant danger of supposing that the poet was inculcating a rule when in fact he was enamoured of a perfection.